Racist?
Bengali In Platforms - questionable, I put it down to bad phrasing
myself.
National Front Disco - no
Asian Rut - no, but arguably quite naieve.
Did anyone see Andrew Collins pop up on the SOTCAA forum? He
basically said the whole Morrissey = racist thing was the result of a
slow news day and a misjudged gesture by Moz himself...

Oh, and somewhere I have an NME from 1999 where a fan wrote in
(possibly after one of Swell's imaginative tirades) with tons of
quotes, mostly from Les Inrockuptibles (or whatever it's called)
where Moz explicitly denies being racist, so it would appear he only
kept his mouth shut to the UK press.

About ten years ago the industry rumour spread that The Moober had
expressed some unexpectedly virulent views about Anglo-Asians at an
otherwise civilised dinner party, which is why NME went after him,
trying to pin him down to an 'I Love Everybody' quote. Which he never
gave. I have no idea whether said remarks were ever made, but after
he was clouted by a carton of fruit juice while pratting around in
front of an audience of skinheads at the Madness reunion show, one
wit filled in the section 'Drink of the Year' in the 'Select' poll
as 'the orange juice which hit Morrissey'. Touche! Murray Chalmers at
Parlophone would probably know, I guess, but I bet he ain't saying.
(See also Dave Haslam's patchy book on DJs, which has some very
interesting and dubious quotes from the man. BTW in Bill Buford's
daft if engrossing 1991 book on football hooliganism 'Among The
Thugs, the author visits a National Front disco (his exact phrase) in
Bury St Edmunds, a singularly unglamorous event.

I still have that NME. Some of the quotes they used to sugggest he
was racist were laughable, to put it mildly. Stuff like 'I hate Diana
Ross' 'Hang the DJ' and so forth. His flirtation with the flag was
ill-judged, of course, but I have strong doubts as to whether he
is/was acually racist. I wonder if the people who thought this are
similar to those who think that 'Amelie' is a racist film because
there are barely any black faces on the screen.

While it might be easy to accuse a company of racism if it failed to employ people
because of their racial origin, and while we might call someone a racist if they
expressed the opinion that Chinese were 'inferior', it's difficult to say that a pop song
is similar to an employment policy or a personal opinion.

A pop song usually has all the ambiguity of any work of art, and it was this ambiguity
that Morrissey had every right to preserve by maintaining his silence in the face of
the NME's inquisition.

Mr Morrissey employed characters. Some were Bengali. (This was already more
than most songwriters did, and probably laudable). Mr Morrissey employed
narrators to tell his stories. His narrators had a position within the song. They were
perhaps characters, perhaps proxies for the author. As usual with art, we will never
know. The songs contained voices which said things like 'Life is difficult enough when
you belong here' or 'Three against one, that can't be fair'. If these were statements
made in a fist fight, we would judge them according to context. In a song, we cannot.
They are just hanging there: provocative, yes, racist, no.

There's an interesting parallel with an exhibition held in the early 90s by Pruitt and
Early called The Black Show. They collected together artifacts of 'blackness'. They
made no earnest Adrian Piper-like statements of condemnation, just presented
these stereotypes and totems without comment. They were hounded out of the art
world in the ensuing controversy. It took Rob Pruitt about eight years to be accepted
once again as a serious artist. He now paints pandas.

Whether or not a piece of 'art' can be racist in itself may be
debatable, but there is such a thing as intention on the creator's
part (see D.W. Griffith, Richard Wagner, Celine, to take three
popular forms. In the case of Mozferatu he was paddling in some
pretty murky pools, especially for someone who deliberately portrayed
himself as an outsider, sensitive to your pain, young fan. (Then
again, he did actually possess a fan base, some of whom might have
been impressionable.) The many Smiths shows I saw in the eighties had
a far higher proportion of British Asian youth present than other
bands attracted, who deserved an explanation far more than the NME.
And even 'conservative Labour' types of the seventies were quite
often as intolerant as their supposed opponents, as anyone who
recalls the Tatchell (Labour) V Mellish (Old Labour... honestly) by-
election in Bermondsey, a dirty 'left-left' V 'right-left' battle
which let in the Lib Dems, will know. BTW did the artist in question
ever take a actual beating for his 'controversial' work? Or was that
treat reserved for plebs of a darker pigment, as usual?

There's a cool book that discusses this subject at length
called 'Sounds English' by Nabeel Zuberi (2001). His conclusion is
that Morrissey is not so much racist as nationalistic. His attraction
to skinheads is read along homoerotic lines, naturally.

Clearly voices within a pop song can express views which are not
those of the author. Momus is right that in many cases we'll never
know. In Morrissey's case especially, I'm not so keen on the rigid
separation of art and the artist. One of the clearest distinctions
between The Smiths and other pop was the directness of Morrissey's
songs, both in use of language and richness of personal experience.
Why should we be so swift to assume that only the unpalletable stuff
should be in the third person, if we also assume that say, How Soon
is Now isn't?

'How Soon Is Now' has exactly the same ambiguity. A lot of Morrissey's songs
present you with the paradox of a handsome, successful 30-something man singing
the sentiments of an ugly, failed adolescent. Did the NME or anyone else pipe up
about that paradox and accuse him of being a liar? Did they parade before him the
evidence of his success (his house in Chelsea, his wealth, the queues of young
Britons of both sexes lining up to be his concubines) and condemn the songs? Of
course not. Like a pantomime audience, they accepted that the middle-aged TV star
was supposed to represent a young prince.

Keeping our pantomime metaphor, the racism episode was when Morrissey became
the pantomime villain and got hissed for reasons as arbitrary as those for which he
was applauded when he was the 'famous international playboy' in role as the
'November monster' (one fiction playing another).

The reasons for the press's change in attitude may be many -- sympathy with Marr, a
preference for Rough Trade over EMI, a sense of boredom with Morrissey's
domination of the music press, an effort to clear the decks for the 90s, the fact that
many journalists had been converted by the acid house revolution to the dance music
Morrissey so despised, and even, I would suggest, some homophobia, since
Morrissey's actual interest in these songs about skinheads and Bengalis may well
come from a sexual interest in both (cf Hanif Kureshi's 'My Beautiful
Launderette', which I think we can assume kindled M's interest quite a bit, and shows
a skin overcoming prejudice by developing a crush on one of his former victims).

Here is the NME's own version of events. Andrew Collins blithely admits that he
doesn't think Morrissey was really a racist. They were just enraged by M's failure to
clarify his use of the Union Jack at Madstock. Collins ends by failing to clarify his own
subsequent use of the Union Jack to promote Britpop at Select.

I never said the Morrissey witch-hunt issue was real journalism, Jon. I said
it was "real" journalism, ie. closer to journalism than the shit we usually
did. I was at Madstock and the crowd were pretty dodgy, some of them - fat,
middle-aged skins who looked like they hadn't come out of their North London
pub since Madness's heyday. Whether Moz is/was a racist or not was less
important than the fact that he was flirting with far right imagery - like a
cultural tourist - and not going on record about his reasons, or his real
feelings. He could have stopped that cover story with one statement. He
chose to remain enigmatic and distant, compounding his error. There was an
artificial excitement in the office over those two days (we dropped Kylie
from the cover for Moz you know!) At first, as features editor, I refused to
get involved, but I was ordered by my boss into the big emergency staff
meeting, and once the decision was made, it was up to the senior staff (me,
Danny Kelly and Stuart Maconie) to get the copy done, along with an
excellent piece by Dele Fadele who is black and could therefore offer a
perspective none of us NME white boys could. (Dele was furious about Moz's
actions and needed no coercion to write.) All I did was compile Morrissey's
faux-racist quotes from every interview he'd ever done, and collate the
lyrics. My own personal opinion never appeared, but I was part of the staff
and stood by the issue. It asked questions of an increasingly remote but
still hugely influential artist who refused to answer them. There are very
few issues of NME from that period that anybody remembers let alone still
talks about. We did our job.

Then Stuart and I left and "reclaimed" the Union Jack for the Select British
issue.

'He chose to remain enigmatic and distant' = he was an artist, who knows that you
have no obligation to explain away your art's ambiguities and ironies with simple
statements in a Jimmy Hill voice to the press.

'Compounding his error' = we, the NME, have our own game plan for 'Moz' (we
even have a different name for him). It is through us that he tells the world what he
'means', and it is for us to tell him when he is making mistakes. We are deeply
invested in him because he sells a lot of papers for us. If he stops talking to us we are
in trouble. We will make him pay. We will find some slur that will stick, then he will
be sorry.

i find skinheads sexy , its playing with the working class , does
this make me racist or one in a rather long history of upper middle
class slummers . I think this is one of the things we are missing ,
maybe with his house in chelsea et al morissey was moving out of his
social place ,maybe he was trying to top as a bottom , economically
speaking ?

I don't think El Mobo is racist (I think 'Bengali in Platforms' is
possibly the best evidence to suggest he is, and even that is just
massively solipsistic, using a caricature as a metaphor for his own
kosmic alienation). However, I do think his career is based on a
perverse enjoyment of the frissons of deviance. In the beginning
there was the undecideability of sexuality: was he
gay/straight/asexual etc. The skinhead thing has an element of this,
as has been pointed out, but I'm sure he also knows it has the
frisson of the forbidden in political terms. There's certainly a
flirtation there. Ironically, the reason he got all the stick at
Madstock was that he was flirting with a constituency who would never
accept him, ie Nutty boy Madness lads, for whom he will always be an
insufferable ponce (in many ways, this is the story of his career). I
think Morrissey's potency as a popstar is in his unique conflation of
the political and the personal (I have a mad theory that,
representing his own civil war, 'The Queen is Dead' is a version
of 'Hamlet': all about fantasies of revenge and vacillation), and as
such, the skinhead thing is kind of irresistable to him. Maybe you
could say this flirtation is socially irresponsible, but I think we
shouldn't expect popstars to be anything else.

Actually, now I come to think of it, the song that is most dubious or
problematic is 'We'll Let You Know': 'we are the last truly British
people you will ever (never want to) know'. It's ambivalent about a
kind of rump of Englishness, implying that all that is left are the
hateful aspects of English crowd culture. I think it's troublesome
nature is kind of interesting, really - much more so than more
ideologically clearcut representations.

ok i sort of agree with you momus, but the artist who refuses to accept that his/her work *will* be mediated = the artist who is
refusing to accept that anyone else evah sees or thinks about it, and does to it what they choose to (eg it leaves moz-world and
enters other worlds, yes he can fight or not fight that, or play or not play, or DO SOMETHING ELSE ALTOGETHER — which would
really have ben the smart response — but he can't moan when he fails to get the reaction he wants, seeing as his JOB is getting
the reaction he wants)

hmm i don't think i put that very well: i am *so* on deadline and not supposed to be reading ILM

Morrissey, well-known for severing ties with friends over real or imaginary slights,
had already decided to cut the NME dead, probably because of editor Danny Kelly's
undisguised partisanship for Johnny Marr. Morrissey's failure to speak to them
(although, as noted above, he continued speaking volubly to people like Les
Inrockuptibles in France) was as big a blow to the NME circa 1990 as it would have
been for Oasis to cut them dead in 1997. They could have said lamely 'The biggest
star in the music firmament will no longer talk to us.' Instead, they said 'The biggest
star in the music firmament is, er, a racist! Down with him! Long live, er, Kingmaker
and, er, The Wonder Stuff!'

'I never said the Morrissey witch-hunt issue was real journalism,
Jon. I said it was "real" journalism, ie. closer to journalism than
the shit we usually did. [WELL THAT'S DOWN TO YOU, ISN'T IT?] I was
at Madstock and the crowd were pretty dodgy, some of them - fat,
middle-aged skins who looked like they hadn't come out of their
North London pub since Madness's heyday [DODGY, OBVIOUSLY1]. Whether
Moz is/was a racist or not was less important than the fact that he
was flirting with far right imagery - like a cultural tourist [LIKE
SOMEONE WHO GOES ON SAFARI TO SEE NORTH LONDON PUB REGULARS AT
PLAY!] - and not going on record about his reasons, or his real
feelings. He could have stopped that cover story with one statement.
He chose to remain enigmatic and distant [i.e., NOT SAYING 'HOW
HIGH' WHEN IPC SAYS 'JUMP'], compounding his error. There was an
artificial excitement in the office [IT CERTAINLY COMES ACROSS] over
those two days (we dropped Kylie from the cover for Moz you know!)
At first, as features editor, I refused to get involved, but I was
ordered by my boss into the big emergency [IPC'S PRIORITIES ARE
COOL!] staff meeting, and once the decision was made, it was up to
the senior staff (me, Danny Kelly and Stuart Maconie) to get the
copy done, along with an excellent piece by Dele Fadele who is black
and could therefore offer a perspective none of us NME white boys
could.[JUST THINK ABOUT THIS STATEMENT FOR A WHILE. LIKE REALLY
THINK ABOUT IT.] (Dele was furious about Moz's actions and needed no
coercion to write.) All I did was compile Morrissey's faux-racist
quotes from every interview he'd ever done, and collate the lyrics.
My own personal opinion never appeared [NO COMMENT, SEE PREVIOUS
SENTENCE], but I was part of the staff and stood by the issue. It
asked questions of an increasingly remote but still hugely
influential artist who refused to answer them [...'FOR US']. There
are very few issues of NME from that period that anybody remembers
let alone still talks about. We did our job. '

Unless I've
COMPLETELY got the wrong end of the stick (first time for
everything) and 'Andrew Collins' is really...

Unfortunately Collins is all too real: I've heard him on the radio,
and encountered him online.

The most intriguing thing about "We'll Let You Know" for me was the
Battle of Hastings / Bayeux Tapestry (what it made *me* think of,
anyway, or maybe an old regional TV thing about same) sequence of
sounds in the middle of the song: his most self-conscious use of
atmospherics rather than lyrics to evoke a certain atmosphere, his
equivalent of the Luke Haines / Winchester Cathedral Choir version
of "In The Bleak Midwinter". I'm not sure whether I think that bit
of "We'll Let You Know" was better and more subtle than the vocal
sections of the song, or just pathetically crude attempts to
establish certain cultural associations. Put another way, I really
can't work out my position on "We'll Let You Know" generally, even
after all this time, which you could say is quite possibly what
Morrissey intended.

The book "Sounds English" that Mike mentions looks interesting: any
details?

This set off a fantasy sequence in my head in which David Bowie's 'Jump They Say',
supposedly about his brother, is actually about another brother, Morrissey. Bowie
had of course been through the same kind of witch-hunt for his supposed 'Hitler
salute' at Victoria station. In the early 90s Bowie and Morrissey were performing
together live and on record -- M did 'Drive In Saturday' live and B returned the
compliment by singing 'I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday' on the same album as
'Jump'. The video for 'Jump' is set in a bleak corporate block -- much like IPC's chilly
King's Reach Tower. Bowie always loved the idea of the messiah figure assassinated
by the kids and the corporations; it's Ziggy, it's The Man Who Fell To Earth. Maybe it
was also, briefly, Mozzy Stardust. (Morrissey shortly afterwards cut Bowie dead
because of some imagined slight backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, I believe.)

He was trying to be the in-the-middle continuum figure at that time,
was he not? Because besides all the Bowie covering and all, he also
was doing "My Insatiable One" by Suhr-uede. Wasn't it you, Momus, who
talked about seeing an early show by them and doing nothing but
videotaping Justine at chest level?

I don't care, just so long as this debate exists. Because then, anytime anyone mentions Morrissey, I can just dismissively say "oh, yeah, that racist motherfucker" and get people to stop fucking talking about him.

Wasn't it you, Momus, who talked about seeing an early show by them and doing
nothing but videotaping Justine at chest level?

It was indeed me. I still have the tape. It was partly because there was only one light
at the Camden Falcon and it happened to be shining right down Justine's chest,
making it look like a relief map of the paps of Jura.

Momus: somewhat unrelated to the actual issue, I agree with Mark -- I
would go further than Mark, actually -- with regard to the
public's right to declare pretty much any artist it chooses a racist,
socialist, misogynist, or neurotic based solely on the content of the
art itself. To say that this screen of "character" somehow mystifies
the whole thing beyond the listener's comprehension is to basically
smack the listener down and say "you are stupid," or at least "you
are not allowed to have critical thinking skills": we can understand
that an artist is "playing" a character and yet -- and note that this
is unrelated to Morrissey -- we are still allowed to make decisions
as to how the artist apparently feels about that character. To
pretend otherwise is to say that Billy Bragg's "The Few" may actually
be pro-racism or that unironically imperious busts of Lenin
could theoretically be arguments for capitalism. People are not
necessarily idiots, and while it may be better to shelve
accusations in those instances where the "text" could be interpreted
either way, this does not bar our essential ability to pass judgement
when we think judgement is called for.

Morrissey's mistake was that his flirtation with the far right seemed
largely a matter of aesthetics, and a matter of fashion. One could
accuse of him "racism" not insofar as there's much evidence that he
actually holds such beliefs, but insofar his willingness to
flirt with them the way 90s bands flirted with trip-hop -- as if he
were completely oblivious to how very important such issues were, and
how his actions could very well make it that much more likely for
thousands of Asian kids to get beaten bloody -- well, this is not a
fine thing to do and not a fine thing to be glib or silent about,
because it matters. The artist's God complex is that he is
free to pick and choose signifiers from the air and invest them only
with whatever meaning he thinks they have to him -- but then it
ceases to be art, which is about communication, and becomes
either impenetrable solipsism or drunken raving. Momus, you should
not give artists a free pass on this any more than you should
give it to bank managers or cab drivers: this "don't draw real-world
conclusions from anything" is a route to making art either
meaningless or completely dull.

(Another way of putting this is that when we look at the Chinese man
in the film of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" -- who is even more of
a "character" than any narrator Morrissey's ever devised -- we're
still learning something very real about how both the screenwriter
and Rooney view, or are willing to view, Chinese men. To say we can't
possibly make critical judgements about such things is to tie our
hands and leave us at the mercy of artists who are often painfully
oblivious to why anything might actually matter in the real
world.)

my point was more, yeh, give morrissey his
"Art = A Free Pass" pass, but then you have
to give the *same* pass to the NME: their
project is also "artistically valid" ie its
consequences in the world are of no
relevance to its aesthetic success (also
audience gets pass, but since its expression
of *its* creative reworking doesn't on the
whole manifest publicly, ILM excepted heh,
this = a slight red herring)

anyway, if moz didn't want to play MassKult
headgamez with stardom and slebrity, why
sign to emi at all? it's a waste of global
corporate outreach and he = a ToTaL LaYMuR
as a result (cf dave q's only-too exact crit of
the actual nme editorial gameplan: this shd
have been a manipulative symbol-war of
titans, using every field of media; instead
SPM went uber-indie on everyone and
(implicitly) made it just abt the music
maaan... basically nme offered him the
chance to be bowie and he fucked out)

I have several questions here. First, isn't the "Union Jack" just
the British flag? What is racist about that? Second, how is any
of this different from the audience-baiting tactics so admired in
people like Iggy Pop (who actually physically attacked the
audience, right?) and the Velvet Underground (who terrorized
with noise, supposedly). Is it less acceptable for a wuss like
Morrissey, whose music is completely non-threatening, to wage
a more subtle war with his audience? To me, it's just about the
only interesting thing about the Smiths. It is especially easy for
me to imagine why someone like Morrissey would want to build
a wall between himself and his audience (alienation being his
lifeblood and meal-ticket). Any fascist imagery could conceivably
serve the dual purpose of parodying this separation between the
Morrissey and his fans, and enhancing this separation by
making the audience feel uncomfortable. The more salient
question to me is, did you, as a Smiths fan, find this material
repugnant or not, and if so, why did you continue listening to the
Smiths?

Every single person I knew growing up who was a Smiths
fan was Asian (mostly of Chinese descent, over here). I haven't
heard any of the Smith's songs in question, but from their titles
I'm guessing they portray the same beautiful losers as all the
other Smiths' songs I have heard. Anyway, it is impossible for
me to fathom that some paki-bashing yob could have been
inspired by Morrissey (of all people!) Or was England in the 80's
really like this?

I just looked at the lyrics to "Asian Rut", and sure enough it's the
same comically macabre melodrama as everything else I've
heard from them. What is supposed to be offensive about stuff
like this? It would be like ladies from Nantucket getting cross
over a dirty limerick.

First note: if you're looking for an excuse for Morrissey, the clear
starting point is that no one got upset about his hard-on for other
types of non-racist Bad People, as there was no ideology to attach to
them -- but surely we can imagine his previous subject-characters
were as violent and nasty as the skins, if for different purposes. I
don't subscribe to this line of reasoning, but still.

Kris, I think you're entirely right -- particularly w/r/t fans and
what Smiths fandom actually "meant" in the public sphere. I, anyway,
was at no point bothered in any deep sense by listening to the
Smiths / Morrissey, and never imagined that Morrissey's flirtations
with near-racist symbols actually reflected near-racist ideology on
his own part. It did, however, make me like him a lot less as time
went on: it is one thing to traffic in such symbols in the process of
making a relevant artistic statement, but to toy mutely with them for
no massive purpose strikes me as dumb and glib and something of a
mockery of how very real and threatening and Actually Quite Serious
such symbols are. It made Morrissey look like a decent artist who
really needed to stick with his own neuroses and keep his nose out of
cultural politics for fear of hugely embarrassing himself.

I wrote in something a while ago that "conservatism" can be a very
lovely thing in pop music, when it is only aesthetic and the actual
workings of the world are not at stake -- thus Morrissey's paens to
vanishing Anglicisms never struck me as actually reactionary.
But as he toed lines between aesthetics and cold hard reality he
raised the possibility that those paens weren't purely
aesthetic or personal/emotional, and I think it made him look both
silly and stupid, or in any case completely unaware that Symbols Mean
Something beyond what they mean in the very scenic midscape of
Stephen Patrick Morrissey.

I do agree that looking at lyrics is unhelpful. "National Front
Disco" is loaded with sarcasm from the very title, and anyway assigns
plenty of threat to the idea: where has our dear boy gone -- oh dear,
he has gone bad, and by that time in the man's career you
could tell that he recognized the badness but just had an
idiosyncratic attraction to it. "Asian Rut" eulogizes the Asian boy,
if patronizingly. "Bengali in Platforms" is basically the height of
condescension and exhibits really iffy word choice with the "belong,"
but it seems less virulent than just sort of solipsistic and dumb,
i.e. Morrissey is so blindly English that he never considers that
life can be way harder elsewhere even if you do "belong"
there, and basically just demonstrates his inability to think
properly about anything that doesn't slot nicely into his very
English little world.

Heh, Heh, heh, heh, You guys! All this speculation is very
amusing, hilarious! But you are all scrutinizing the issue to
closely. What you need to do is stand back and look at the writing
on the wall. Any of you who love Morrissey should know by now (and
the rest of who do not should listen up). The Man is a genius at
using words and imagery to add to all that he is and projects
outwardly to be. All of his songs are controversial to some degree,
however each are all just stories about people... Merely fictional
characters! Vauxhall and I: The girl in "Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl
Drowning" is going to let her nemesis drown. There is a Stalking
song: "The More you ignore me the closer I get", The whole entire
album of Kill Uncle is claimed to be about murders. November spawned
a monster about a birth defective person in a wheel chair. C'mon!!!
For crying out loud!! The minute you read the lyrics for National
Front Disco or Bengali In Platforms you should have known that it was
all Morrissey storytelling with young protagonist feeling misplaced
and looking for approval or love. Does Everyone actually think that
Morrissy was 16, clumsy and Shy and went to London and Booked Himself
in at the Y.W.C.A??? - NO that song is about a 16 YEAR OLD SHY CLUMY
GIRL WHO HAS A CRUSH ON SOMEONE.... Get it together folks! It's
Called SENSATIONALISM!!! Do think that Motley Crue worshiped Satan? -
NO! Do you think that Vanilla Ice or the Backstreet Boys came from a
rough neighborhood? - No Siree! Do you think that Micheal Jackson
had a woman named Billy Jean to accuse him of impregnating her?
Nope, just a song my friends. -Hey maybe Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones,
and Robert Plant really know this lady who bought the actual stairway
TO HEAVEN???!! People they're just songs, and there just stories
and I believe that Morrissey is very outspoken and if he were really
racist, or desired to look racist I doubt we would have to be
guessing by the lyrics in one of his many many story telling songs.
Get - a - life....

I think this is the part where somebody tells us we gotta honour
the fire or something. Anyhow, resuscitated threads are OK by
me, especially when the personified-narrator catch-all is being
exhumed from its grave yet again. Morrissey has made an entire
career out of arguing, explicitly, that the distance between his
authorial voice and himself is as narrow a distance as can
reasonably be achieved in art. Odd, how the personified narrator
defense is most often invoked when defending people who
should know better against charges of either racism or sexism.
Odd.////// As to the utterly brilliant "16 Clumsy and Shy," our Mozz-
loving friend above (don't freak, I love him m'self, quite a lot
actually) has missed the point of that song completely. The joke
is that Morrissey/Morrissey's narrator (O how dull to do that every
time, lest one be accused of unsophisticated theoretical
grounding!), a young man uncomfortable in his own skin,
attempted to check himself into the YWCA. The point of the big
dramatic pause after he pronounces "Y" is to play up how sadly
comic the vision of a 16 year old Mancunian guy going to the big
city and checking in at the YWCA is. The narrator of the song is
male.

that statement is certainly a much better way of making his point even if the logic is based on a provably false assertion ("people feel the same way about the death of animals as they feel about the death of people")

nah me neither, i'm fumbling with what i believe rather than getting bolshy here. and my dad also told me never to work in a factory, but then his aspirations and imagination - and i don't blame him or criticize him really, we are who we are - were too limited to fully understand that white collar wage slavery can be its own hell and not necessarily a better one than the world of making stuff. i will insist that rejecting the work ethic in toto isn't just some foppish bourgie-ism but a strand of left thinking that critiques Marx and his followers' accommodation with the way capitalism works, or the vision of socialism as a liberated worker-run capitalism. it's not the only vision as far as i'm concerned.

It's a really interesting argument for me, and I'm also very conflicted, NV and Doran. I guess it's the difference between old school socialism, liberal idealism and anarchism as protest - all ideologues I guess I've flirted with through life. It's also a massive chink in the armour of left-thinking, one that can easily be set upon by right-wing rhetoric: "So you want to work, but you don't want to work? Sounds like the moon on a stick".

there'll be crazy David Icke-type conspiracists out there who'll tell you they drink the blood of the living or something (and Morrissey is quite possibly of that number) but expressing direct hate for them is aimed as much at the "monarchy is harmless and they are cute kids" tolerators as serious defenders of the crown, i guess

This thread on Morrissey Solo has full-page scans of a lengthy interview with Morrissey in Loaded, to be published tomorrow.

It's a weird piece, a largely unedited 5-page transcript of Moz expounding at great length his views on the political world. As if anyone was in any doubt, Morrissey comes across as a very odd and bitter old crank.

Sample quote: "I nearly voted for UKIP. I like Nigel Farage a great deal. His views are quite logical - especially where Europe is concerned." And there's lots more where that came from.